CMEI Colloquium
Longfellow Hall, Harvard Graduate School of Education
March 24, 2011
The traditional teaching of history focused mainly on national history. The main objectives of this traditional approach were to celebrate the nation and build a national identity. Those identity objectives relied principally on emotional factors and promoted a romantic view of the nation. In recent decades, however, very different objectives have emerged within the discipline of history. These objectives focus mainly on cognitive skills and the development of historical and critical thinking. The concept of the nation still remains a key concept in learning history, and it seems necessary to take into account people’s perceptions of this concept in order to better understand the relationship between identity and disciplinary objectives of history. The speaker discussed Spanish college students’ conceptions of the nation and their impact on historical understanding.
Speaker Biography: César López Rodríguez is a doctoral student at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, from which he has earned a degree in Psychology. In 2008 he obtained an advanced studies certificate in cognitive psychology. He has also been a visiting scholar at Northeastern University (2009). He is especially interested in conceptual change in history and its connections with national identity.